Perfections (15 page)

‘I thought you were working today,’ she says, turning to face–

–not her sister but
Paul
. Standing beside the kitchen bench in his customary black T-shirt and jeans, hair loose and still dripping from the shower. That same smug grin on his face that she’s always detested.

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘You two are back together?’

‘It’s not what you think.’

‘Is she here?’

‘At the restaurant. She’ll be home for dinner.’

‘Home?’ She raises an eyebrow. ‘Here, you mean? Is there something wrong with your place?’

He shakes his head. ‘I need to explain.’

‘Never mind.’ She doesn’t want to hear his excuses. His flimsy justifications for behaving the way he did. Artistic temperament? Wounded pride? Fear of abandonment? Bad enough her sister obviously deemed such offerings worthy of forgiveness. Bad enough she will have to listen to Ant rationalise it all herself anyway. Validation for the lovelorn. For the terminally lost.

Jacqueline turns back to the sink. Flicks off the tap and begins to pile dishes into the near-scalding water. She’s furious. At Paul. At her sister. At Dante and Ryan Jellicoe and sweet little Becca in whose mouth butter wouldn’t so much as soften. But mostly at herself, for allowing everything to spin so completely out of control. Beneath the suds, her hands tremble. She considers the razor blades hidden in her toiletries bag.

She needs time. She needs to be alone.

‘Here,’ Paul says, close by her side. ‘Let me.’

Jacqueline swivels on her heel. Looks up into a face that looms higher than she remembers. That seems somehow different. Finer-boned or whiter-skinned, with eyes pale as polar ice. Were they always like that? She would have sworn his eyes were brown. Brown or hazel. Some dull, muddy colour. A vague recollection of a Halloween party skitters across her mind. Ant with her face and forearms powdered and irises tinted a disconcerting shade of red.

‘Are you wearing contacts?’ she asks him.

This smile is nothing she has seen before. Cautiously open and more genuine than she would have thought Paul capable of being. He takes her hands from the sink. Dries their reddened skin on his shirt.

‘I need to explain,’ he says again. ‘Please.’

Jacqueline stares at him. Takes in his inexplicable height, his strangely altered features. The way his fingers close around hers in a manner that asks permission even as the liberty is taken. And there’s something else. An air about him, or perhaps
the
air about him. Crisp and sharp and
new
. She has no words to describe it. Knows only that the man standing in front of her is not Paul. Was never
Paul
.

‘Who are you?’ Her voice is barely a whisper.

‘Come with me,’ he says.

Jacqueline allows him to lead her away from the sink, out of the kitchen. She isn’t afraid – she can never
be
afraid – not of him. She has no idea where such conviction comes from, only that it fits within her as close and faultless as truth.

Antoinette pours herself more wine, reaches across her sister’s coffee table to top up Loki as well. Jacqueline covers her glass with a flattened palm even though it’s still full, barely a mouthful missing and not worth the addition of anything more. Her sister’s usual trick, the sly and careful nursing of one solitary drink all through the meal, or night out, or whatever the occasion happens to be, and even then it’ll be rare to see the glass emptied. Antoinette doesn’t know why she bothers.

‘I can’t believe you’re so cool with all this,’ she says.

Jacqueline shrugs. ‘He’s here, isn’t he? Hard to refute that.’ She sits with the purple notebook open in her lap, flips each page and runs her fingertips over the lines which themselves hold nothing but those shallow grooves and indentations, braille in reverse, and Antoinette wishes she would leave the bloody thing alone for five minutes.

‘There’s nothing, not a single word left.’

‘Yes.’ Jacqueline says. ‘But I wonder . . .’

‘I didn’t really think you’d believe me.’ Antoinette glances at Loki. ‘Believe us, I mean. Thought I’d have to, you know, prove it somehow, get the two of them together or something, side by side.’

‘But you said he shouldn’t see me,’ Loki says.

‘He
shouldn’t
,’ Antoinette tells him. ‘I just meant, I didn’t think she would be so easy to convince.’

‘Loki explained it all,’ Jacqueline says, dismissive. ‘I wish we could still see what you wrote. You can’t remember any of it?’

‘Not really. Not the details.’

This is freaking her out all over again. Arriving home from work to find not just Loki but her
sister
, the two of them sitting side by side on the couch like old friends, like co-conspirators, the murmur of their voices trailing off as she came into the living room. And Jacqueline laughing, rising gracefully to pull her into a hug, words warm as breath in her ear.
Close your mouth, Ant, something will fall in.
She should be glad, relieved that Loki has already done most of the heavy lifting, because she sure as hell hasn’t been able to think of the right way to explain things. Still, it seems too easy, her sister’s calm acceptance of the situation, of
Loki
– as if he’s no more than a stray dog dragged home from the pound.

‘I’ve got an idea.’ Jacqueline sets her glass down on the coffee table, tucks the notebook beneath her arm as she rises. ‘Back in a minute.’

Antoinette waits until her sister has left the room before turning to Loki, turning on Loki. ‘What did you tell her? I mean, what did you
say
, exactly?’

‘The truth.’

‘And she believed you, just like that?’

Loki sips at his wine. ‘She’s very perceptive.’

‘But it’s insane. If she came up to me out of the blue and said, hey look, here’s this guy I somehow
made
, somehow magicked into existence or whatever, I mean . . . it’s
insane
. I don’t get how she can just
believe
it.’

‘Hard to argue with what’s right in front of your face.’ He pats his chest, his hand falling over the heart that beats unquestionably beneath that black cotton shirt, beneath skin and muscle and ribcage, and Antoinette finds herself marvelling afresh at the miracle sitting on the couch opposite her. Loki smiles. ‘See?’

She shakes her head. ‘It’s not like you have my name stamped on your arse.
Trademark Antoinette Paige
, or some shit. You could be just a person for all anyone could really tell.’

‘You don’t think I’m a
person
?’

It’s a gift, this ability she has of finding precisely the wrong words to say at any given moment. Words that wound with such blind precision, she might have spent months honing their edge.

‘I’m sorry,’ she tells him. ‘That came out wrong.’

‘You sure it didn’t come out exactly right?’

‘Loki, you know I wouldn’t . . .’

His gaze shifts past her, scowl softening to a smile as Jacqueline walks back into the room. Shaking her head, she settles down beside him again with one leg crossed over the other, one stockinged foot rocking gently in his direction.

‘It didn’t work.’ She opens the notebook to a once-white page, holds up the pencil she must have used to colour it a uniform, shimmery grey. ‘I saw it in a film once. I thought we might be able to show up the indentations from the pen, even if the ink itself has . . . evaporated? But no luck.’

Antoinette leans close, squinting as she tries to make out words or letters or anything approaching some kind of sense from the textured stripes of lead. There are markings, sure; swirls and scratches and dots that tantalise and tease, but nothing legible. Nothing to illuminate the shape of her thoughts that night, if thoughts are what they could be called, those vodka-fuelled fantasies from which she had so unwittingly spun the creature – the
person
– now calling himself Loki.

‘Useless.’ She slumps back in her chair.

‘But worth a try,’ Loki says, touching her sister’s wrist.

‘I don’t think it really matters.’ Jacqueline frowns. ‘What I mean is, the words themselves may not be very important. I know you both think it was a . . . spell? Or some such? But–’

Antoinette snorts. ‘A spell?’

‘That was me,’ Loki says. ‘That was my word.’

‘I didn’t cast a
spell
, Loki. You think I’m what, some kind of witch?’

‘That’s not what I said. You were the one talking about magic.’

‘For want of a better word, god! I didn’t mean that I literally–’

‘Enough,’ Jacqueline says. ‘Both of you, stop it.’ She closes the notebook, slides it across the coffee table. ‘It would be
nice
to know what Ant wrote – nice for Loki to see the words that shaped him, so to speak – but it doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t explain
how
he was made, or what happens to him now.’

‘You weren’t even here,’ Antoinette protests. ‘How can you know anything?’

Jacqueline sighs and leans back against the couch. Fine lines crease her forehead, pull the corners of her mouth into a taut and thoughtful expression that Antoinette knows only too well. Her sister, contemplating what needs to be said, each potential word and phrase weighed and measured according to some precise internal scale of her own, and it drives Antoinette mad sometimes, this over-thinking of anything even vaguely important, when she should just bloody well come out and–

‘Tell us,’ Loki says, his voice soft, smooth and firm as a hand gloved in leather, and Jacqueline turns to look at him, her eyes snapping back into focus.

‘Yes,’ she says and then, to Antoinette: ‘Remember when we were little, really little? Remember the fendlies?’

Antoinette starts to shake her head, starts to say that she doesn’t have the foggiest what her sister is on about, and yet that word –
fendlies
– feels strange and familiar both at once, its flint-sharp edge striking a place laid so deep in her memory it defies articulation. Throws off merely a spark, vivid and certain but too brief to catch hold, too painful to fan and,
no
, she warns herself.
Not that, not there
.

You don’t want to see that.

‘You must remember something,’ Jacqueline says.

‘No.’ Antoinette swallows the last of her wine in two large gulps and deposits the empty glass on the floor. ‘I don’t remember anything.’ Not sunlight flickering through trees or the shriek of girlish laughter, not the glimmer of glass-bright eyes or the silken warmth of fur against her cheek.

‘What are the fendlies?’ Loki asks.

‘We were only children,’ Jacqueline tells him. ‘I wasn’t even in school yet, so four years old perhaps? Which would have made you about two, Ant?’

Antoinette crosses her arms. ‘How can you expect me to remember if I was only two?’

Her sister ignores her. ‘There weren’t any other children around where we lived and our mother didn’t believe in playgroups or kindergarten, or perhaps she couldn’t afford to send us, so we only had each other. The fendlies were . . . well, Ant was only little. She couldn’t say
friends
properly, or
friendly
. So, friendly ones became
fendly
ones.
Fendlies
, you see?’

Loki nods, glances at Antoinette. ‘None of this rings a bell?’

She shakes her head. A dull, throbbing pain has set up camp behind her eyes and she just wants them to shut up, her sister and Loki both, to shut up and go away and leave her alone.

‘They weren’t real,’ Jacqueline continues. ‘She made them up. They weren’t human, either, most of them. More along the lines of animals, or . . . other things. Like the puppets from
Sesame Street
.’

‘So?’ Antoinette snaps. ‘Lots of kids have imaginary friends.’

Her sister stares at her. ‘But, Ant, I could see them as well.’

‘You could
see
them?’ Loki echoes.

‘I used to think I imagined it all,’ Jacqueline says. ‘We were both so little and it’s not as though I can remember all that clearly anymore either. I told myself that I must have simply been pretending along with Ant, convincing myself that the fendlies were really there – you know, the way children do with monsters under the bed, or Santa Claus – because anything else was impossible, wasn’t it?’ She reaches out and touches his face, trails the tips of her fingers along his jawline. ‘Until now. Until you.’

He smiles, captures her hand with his own and squeezes. ‘I’m not impossible?’

‘Perhaps, but you’re most definitely here.’

Antoinette wonders at the effect Loki is having on her sister. She has never seen Jacqueline so at ease with someone who is, after all, a near perfect stranger. Her relaxed posture, the way she allows her hand to sit so still within his, the curious, almost coy tilt of her head when she speaks to him – all of it so utterly unlike the sister-shaped space that Antoinette keeps in her heart.

‘What happened to them?’ Loki asks her. ‘The fendlies, where are they now?’

‘I told you, I don’t remember.’ Antoinette’s headache intensifies and there’s a taste like sour milk in the back of her mouth.